Developers using Microsoft tools who want to design distributed Web applications should download the companys SOAP Toolkit 2.0 Beta 1 at msdn.microsoft.com/xml/general/soap1and2.asp.
The tool kit provides a set of tools and sample code (the samples are written in Visual Basic right now, not C or C++) for using Simple Object Access Protocol in Web applications. SOAP is an XML-based RPC mechanism that replaces Microsofts DCOM. The SOAP standards proposal is primarily backed by Microsoft and IBM and is under consideration by the World Wide Web Consortium as a Web standard.

The 2.0 release of the tool kit is SOAP 1.1-compliant, uses the W3C candidate recommendation standard for XML data typing and XML Schema instead of Microsofts proprietary XML-Data Reduced format, and supports Unicode. Microsoft announced it will fully support the production release of the tool kit later this year.

The Apache Group also provides a mostly SOAP 1.1-compliant tool kit, written in Java, at xml.apache.org/soap that will be a better choice for Java developers.

Timothy Dyck is a Senior Analyst with eWEEK Labs. He has been testing and reviewing application server, database and middleware products and technologies for eWEEK since 1996. Prior to joining eWEEK, he worked at the LAN and WAN network operations center for a large telecommunications firm, in operating systems and development tools technical marketing for a large software company and in the IT department at a government agency. He has an honors bachelors degree of mathematics in computer science from the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, and a masters of arts degree in journalism from the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada.